19 KiB
[D]Writing advice from Eliezer Yudkowsky
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Author: u/None *
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URL: http://dataandphilosophy.tumblr.com/post/101485420151/yudkowskys-writing-advice
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Score: 25
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Created: 2014-11-01T12:57:02
Post:
Comments:
u/None [+3] (20 minutes later)
Good to see this on the first day of RaNoWriMo. Thanks for posting, /u/Yxoque!
On that note, I'm a bit surprised I've never seen The Fall of Doc Future posted here before ...
u/Mr_Smartypants [+1] (10 hours later)
NaNoWriMo?
u/None [+3] (10 hours later)
Rational National Writing Month
u/Mr_Smartypants [+2] (12 hours later)
Ha! excellent.
u/Anderkent [+1] (4 days later)
On that note, I'm a bit surprised I've never seen The Fall of Doc Future posted here before
Having binge-read all of it in maybe two days, I feel like it deserves its own post.
u/None [+1] (5 days later)
Go for it!
u/TimTravel [+3] (4 hours later)
And as long as I’m on the subject: ‘literary’ stories about broken people becoming even more broken are not fun to read on grounds of pure hedonics. If you try to countersignal that your story must be very hip and contrarian because it offers so little merely pleasurable reward for reading it, don’t expect to sucker anyone self-aware enough to have moved on past meta-contrarianism.
I'm not sure if I'm misinterpreting, but surely there's nothing wrong with sad stories.
u/VorpalAuroch [+12] Life before Death (12 hours later)
My view on this: This isn't a property of sad stories, it's more specific than that. The examples of the genre he mentions I think of are Death of a Salesman and the collected works of J.D. Salinger, particularly Catcher in the Rye. They're about unsympathetic, stupid people, who make poor decisions and end up less sympathetic and just as stupid as they started.
It's OK to write stories where the challenges are insurmountable and the main characters lose, or where you make them suffer a lot. (Luminosity does the first, and nearly everything Alicorn writes does the second.) But if the characters aren't worthy of any respect and neither are the things they accomplished, and there isn't any pleasure from the resolution, there's nothing to draw in the reader.
u/None [+8] (12 hours later)
Basically, it's the difference between the first part of Up and, like, everything with Batman in it.
u/None [+1] (20 hours later)
I think you just managed to sum up why I really hate Batman.
u/None [+1] (a day later)
Someone on tumblr recently said: "Who wants to be Batman? Not even Batman wants to be Batman." Which I think is a great summary of why Batman generally isn't all that interesting.
u/eaglejarl [+1] (7 days later)
Batman generally isn't all that interesting.
Really? Batman is a normal man(*), but he competes on a pretty even footing with people like Superman and Wonder Woman, who are effectively gods. He's been shown able to one-shot the entire Justice League, and he does it purely through intelligence and good planning. Lots of people say "oh, he only wins because it's his book and PersonX would totally beat him", but even those people can't deny that he brings things to the League that they need and that no one else brings: planning, tactics, leadership, contacts, detective ability... the list goes on.
There's nothing interesting about that?
(*) I suppose "normal" is stretching it -- he's human max on every axis. Still within human possibilities, though.
u/None [+1] (7 days later)
His skills certainly are impressive, but that's not what makes for an interesting character.
Written by a good writer, Batman can be sorta interesting to read, but he's not allowed any character development because having the character come to terms with his past trauma ruins what makes him popular.
u/eaglejarl [+1] (7 days later)
[getting over trauma] Ok, that's fair.
[no character dev] Don't know that I'd agree with that. They've explored his relationships and how they change over time, his inner fears and moments of weakness...given that "his character" is "stone cold badass", I'd call that plenty of character development. Char dev doesn't have to mean massive life change, it can also mean deepening and enrichig.
u/alexanderwales [+7] Time flies like an arrow (17 hours later)
The Catcher in the Rye isn't about accomplishment. And I don't think that stories need to be about resolution either. Sometimes a story is just an exploration of how a person thinks, or how the world works, and I think that there can be an immense value in that. I watched a movie recently - though I can't recall the title - that was all about broken people being broken. And at the end of the movie, no one had gotten any less broken, and stupid decisions had been made, but those decisions were realistic ones, and those broken people were fully realized characters. I like reading stories about people making bad choices, because if they're well-written there's an enormous amount of complexity there - even if the character isn't sympathetic.
It sort of goes without saying that I heavily disagree with Yudkowsky on the topic of literary merit. Those essays are a great guide to writing stuff that Yudkowsky would like, but he seems to be betraying an enormous lack of empathy for people who aren't himself. The jab at "literary" works was probably the worst part of it.
But I'm an English major, so maybe I'm just showing my biases.
u/celeritatis [+3] (a day later)
Data and Philosophy here: Yes. Yudkowsky is trashing a vast number of stories. I think that there are large classes of fiction that would be better if people followed his rules, including most mainstream SF&F, detective novels, and most other things that get called "genre". That's part of why I linked: I expect most of the things I see written this NaNoWriMo to be "genre" in this sense.
I agree with you that there's a lot of other good sorts of stories, that portray people and help one understand something different. It took me years of being exposed to "great books" to finally get my hands on All The King's Men, which showed me this alternate path. I imagine most people have a book like that. But those are a fairly small minority of what tends to get written, so I felt comfortable including his advice.
u/VorpalAuroch [+1] Life before Death (a day later)
Sometimes a story is just an exploration of how a person thinks, or how the world works, and I think that there can be an immense value in that.
Taking Catcher in the Rye again: It's about a worthless person there's no reason to care about, and doesn't say anything interesting about anything else. That's a big part of the 'broken people' piece; there's nothing to engender any respect for the worthless character. All Holden's problems are of his own making, he's not just an ass but a stupid ass, and he's incredibly self-unaware about those things. Salinger doesn't give anyone who isn't a broken person themself (which, OK, Salinger was himself) a reason to care.
u/alexanderwales [+5] Time flies like an arrow (a day later)
Salinger doesn't give anyone who isn't a broken person themself (which, OK, Salinger was himself) a reason to care.
I feel like dismissing people as broken for liking something that you don't like is not conducive to good conversation.
u/VorpalAuroch [+1] Life before Death (a day later)
Salinger only wrote fictionalized autobiography; all his main characters are him. He's precisely as broken as Holden is. My understanding was that this was generally-known consensus.
u/alexanderwales [+4] Time flies like an arrow (a day later)
I'm not talking about Salinger - I'm talking about people who like reading Salinger. You're painting a very negative picture with an awfully large brush. I'm not going to defend The Catcher in the Rye, because it's been a decade since I've read it, but you keep dismissing people who claim to like something that you don't like as trying to signal something or seeking status, and then you call them broken. Why on earth would anyone who liked the book want to have a conversation with you?
I've already explained why I like stories with broken characters in them, but you seem ready to dismiss this as a lie, or worse, as me being a broken person. Do you understand how I could find this to be insulting on a number of levels?
u/VorpalAuroch [-2] Life before Death (a day later)
You haven't explained it at all.
u/alexanderwales [+3] Time flies like an arrow (a day later)
I like reading about broken characters because if they're written well, they're complex, and there's an intrigue that with understanding them, and seeing them do the (often stupid, selfish, etc.) things that they do. I believe that there's both interest and value in looking over a character's shoulder as they do stupid things, if only to realize what it is that they're thinking - whether it's a housewife who has an affair because she's bored and lonely, or a soldier who's suffering from PTSD and kills his wife, or yes, even a bratty teenager who thinks he knows everything. I may not care about the characters - I may even despise them - but I want to know what happens because they're fleshed out and in some way real, and I want to understand them even if I don't feel like I will ever sympathize with them. For me, at least, reading that gives me something to think about, and enhances the richness of the world by teaching me things that I didn't know before.
In other words, I like reading stories about people making bad choices, because if they're well-written there's an enormous amount of complexity there - even if the character isn't sympathetic. I can understand why someone would feel otherwise, but being called a liar and a broken person for enjoying a certain kind of literature is not something that I take kindly to.
u/VorpalAuroch [+1] Life before Death (a day later)
OK, that's an explanation, thanks. I think the fundamental difference is that to me, 'literary'/broken characters usually don't feel 'in some way real'.
u/696e6372656469626c65 [+1] I think, therefore I am pretentious. (26 days later)
Hm. I have that same feeling. I can't claim to speak for you or anyone else, but I'm going to try and articulate why I dislike broken characters.
In general, broken characters don't plan. They don't do things. They don't optimize. You know that trope, "Villains Act, Heroes React"? Well, broken characters don't even really react. There's a reason stories aren't about your average Joe. I don't want to read a story about an average Joe. No wonder, then, that I don't like stories about depressed Joes.
"But," someone else may say, "it is often the case that depressed characters have good reason to be depressed. Isn't it fascinating to explore the psyche of a broken person? Broken people are interesting."
To which I reply:
It is entirely possible that a depressed character has an interesting backstory. However, unless the author writes that character extremely well (and I do mean extremely well), I can't fathom how interesting that backstory is. As an non-depressed person, I cannot will myself into a depressed character's place. It's entirely possible that from whatever emotional perspective the character is in, his/her actions make internal sense. But try as I might, I can't place myself into that emotional perspective at will, and not to sound callous, but I don't really want to, either. It's the author's job to make the character interesting to me, not my job.
And for some reason, writing a character that is simultaneously broken and sympathetic is really hard to do. Authors may do it to signal experience and cynicism and wisdom, but the end result is (to me) something that is neither enjoyable nor interesting to read. In Yudkowsky's essay on Level 1 Intelligent Characters, he wrote:
The scriptwriter thought it would make a Dramatic Moment to leave Bilbo watching the side of the mountain alone. But the price of that Dramatic Moment was to populate the movie with strange, bizarre creatures who do not think like you or I; and so the Dramatic Moment fell flat, at least for me.
He was referring, of course, to movie!Thorin's decision to throw down the key in a fit of anger, an act that caused Thorin to lack an "inner spark of optimization", making him an "H-Zombie". But I think it applies just as well here. Broken characters don't lack an "inner spark of optimization" because they no longer want to optimize. That may be a good way for an author to signal experience and cynicism and wisdom, but the price of that signal is to populate the work with strange, bizarre creatures who do not think like you are I; and so the attempt falls flat, at least for me.
How do you write an emotionally sympathetic character? I don't know. Writing ideologically sympathetic characters is (relatively) easy; just look at Professor Quirrell as an example. Writing emotionally sympathetic characters, on the other hand, especially depressed ones, is damn hard. Maybe if the reader is allowed to follow the character from the beginning, when the character isn't depressed, slowly tracing the long, winding path to depression, crossing each step of inferential distance individually... but to my knowledge, authors tend not to do that sort of thing. Instead, they want to present the depression of the characters firsthand, without providing any inferential steps for the reader to trace. This may work for the author, because the author is already there (Salinger experienced clinical depression while writing The Catcher in the Rye), but to assume that the reader will instantly be able to follow along is to commit an example of the Typical Mind Fallacy.
TL;DR: Writing broken characters that are nonetheless interesting is hard as heck. If not for my knowledge that the human memory is fallible, I'd say that I've never seen it done quite right.
u/None [-2] (a day later)
Be nice or I'll rewrite your mind to make you nicer.
u/None [+2] (a day later)
But people do care about Holden. People like the book. They're out there (hi). You might dislike the book yourself, clearly. You might feel contempt for people who like the book. You could even call them broken, although that would be stupid and wrong (doing quite fine here, thanks). But saying things like "there's no reason to care" is just wrong on its face.
I can understand where you're coming from. I think it should be objectively impossible to find Frozen emotionally engaging, and it's frustrating when people keep disagreeing, as if their darned opinions should count for anything.
u/VorpalAuroch [+2] Life before Death (a day later)
Well, what reason is there to care?
u/None [+3] (a day later)
Well, all the normal reasons to care about a confused kid struggling with his emotions and some genuinely harrowing situations. Holden is kind of an idiot, but it's a familiar, human idiocy most of us have experienced in some capacity in some environment, even if it might not be obvious to oneself immediately. You know, normal human decency? When HJPEV dismisses Hagrid as not being useful to him, he's being a jerk.
u/VorpalAuroch [+2] Life before Death (a day later)
I guess that's a reason. To me, Holden looks like a Stupid Mutant in the same way that badly written villains look like Evil Mutants. He's stupid in a way that does not resemble anyone I've ever known.
u/None [+2] (12 hours later)
Many people are drawn in by the stories you mentioned as examples and consider them quite powerful, so....
u/VorpalAuroch [+5] Life before Death (13 hours later)
None of them I've met has ever been able to articulate why those stories are not considered trash, when it's come up, so I'm fairly sympathetic to the notion that they are, in fact, trash, and are admired only because it signals sophistication.
Also, I have met certain teenagers who were as stunted and unsympathetic as Holden Caulfield or the Lomans (Linda excluded; she's the only remotely sane person in that story). Those people might find the story more interesting, since they could actually see themself in the characters to some extent.
u/None [+0] (13 hours later)
"Trash" is a strong word. If you haven't met anyone who can articulate why Death of a Salesman and J.D. Salinger's works aren't considered trash, you have not been meeting the right people.
u/VorpalAuroch [+0] Life before Death (a day later)
Well, if you did so, that would be an existence proof. If you can't, I'll continue to be skeptical those people actually exist.
u/None [+0] (a day later)
Okay, look, unless you either know absolutely nothing about literature or are using a very special and specific-to-you definition of "trash," you can't seriously think no one in the world could possibly articulate why Death of a Salesman is a pretty good play or why J.D. Salinger is thought of pretty highly as a writer.
u/VorpalAuroch [+3] Life before Death (a day later)
I absolutely can. I've heard people try to defend it really unconvincingly, and it's possible that no one actually has a better reason than that, other than signalling.
u/None [+3] (20 hours later)
Wow. Actually, this is one of those times when I'm just unequivocally agreeing with Eliezer. There really are some stories that offer no deep meaning beyond the fact that the author is just kinda an emo kid who needs to grow the hell up.
But then again, there's a large fraction of the human race that's constantly obsessed with its own brokenness, so much so that I've often wondered if we're the unusual ones for simply not wanting to be broken at all, or not wanting to dwell on such.
u/None [+3] (a day later)
Keep in mind that Yudkowsky writes with a specific goal: teaching people new things they can use in their own lives. Maybe this advice should be seen in that light?